50 SEO Tips to Increase Search Engine Ranking

Year 2010 is almost over. How is your blogging venture? As a novice blogger, have you reached your first 100 unique visitors for your blog? For me, it's great! I learned a lot by using Google correctly and with the help of other blogs in the web. I regained my spot (#3) in Topblogs.ph after i changed into new domain name sometime in the mid part of August 2010.

SEO Tips to Increase Ranking in SERP

Before the year end, let me share to you some great 50 SEO tips that will help you as you start your own blog. As a beginner, we are very much excited on how we can generate tremendous amount of traffic for our blog and hopefully turn our blog into a money-making machine.

Curiosity will really add more valuable knowledge to you as a blogger. You don't have to spend great amount of money just to learn Search Engine Optimization(SEO) for your blog. All you need to do is be open-minded and use the available resources right in front of you. Since you are looking for some SEO tips, use Search Engines - may it be Google, Yahoo, Ask or Bing. Use different SEO related keywords just to satisfy your Search Engine Optimization Need.

Here's the fruit of my curiosity -

General Rules in Search Engine Optimization:

1. Make blogs or websites for people, not search engines.
2. Make websites that convert to your end goal...not just rank for keywords.
3. Build a brand around a community. One that loves you and will fight for you because they love your services. Don't shut them off.
4. Make your brand so big that search engines need you.
5. Don't focus on just one keyword. Do a proper keyword research to find out what people seeking your products and services are actually using.
6. Don't forget to read Google's SEO Starter Guide

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SEO Tips for Title Tags:

• Make sure your title tag includes your keyword
• A compelling call-to-action might help you get a better click-through rate in Google search engine results pages.
• Make title tag unique on each page. [Use Google Webmaster Tools to detect problems with title tags]
• Avoid keyword stuffing in your page title.

SEO Tips on the Use of Headings (H1, H2 and H3):
Headings (h1) and sub-headings (h2, h3) are texts that are written between those heading tags.

• Avoid keyword stuffing in any of heading tags because it will do more harm than good.
• Using your Keyword in H1 or H2 can give some minor positive effects on SEO.
• H1 is the most important heading - Use it only once or twice per document and include your keyword there if it fits naturally.
  

SEO Tips Regarding the Body Text: Body text is the text from your web page without all the HTML tags and code.

• Make sure that the keyword you are targeting with this page really is in your body text.
• Avoid keyword stuffing in body text. Take note - each page should be targeted to different keywords.
• Put main keyword closer to the top of the document.
• Don't hide text through color by blending text color with background color.
• Avoid too high keyword density (>10%) as it may lead to penalty (use synonyms, related words and LSI words)

SEO Tips on Using URL:

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. URL is the address of your web page.

Suggestions for Domain Name

• If possible, put your main keyword in the domain name.
• For SEO it seems that there is no difference between delimiting words in domain name or writing them together. From marketing standpoint it's better not to delimit words in domain name with dashes because of word of mouth marketing.

Suggestions for URL

• Make user-friendly URL ; put your keywords there and leave out stop words like "I", "a", and "an" etc. Also avoid special characters like "&", "?", "=", "$", "%". "^" in the URL
• Avoid keyword stuffing in URLs and try to keep them in reasonable length.
• Use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.

SEO Tips on the Use of Sitemap

Sitemap is a file (or multiple files) that list URLs for a site.

• It is important to submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools
• It is important to include a link to sitemap file in your robots.txt file
• If you want to put sitemap on different domain you must put a link to it in your robots.txt file
• All information about sitemaps - http://www.sitemaps.org/
• You can also submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools
• If you don't have a sitemap, try sitemap generators

SEO Suggestions about Links:

Internal linking and links in general are very important from SEO standpoint. Search engine algorithms use anchor texts extensively.

• Follow Google's suggestions on URL structure: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=76329&hl=en
• For internal linking - put nofollow attribute on links to unimportant pages (from SEO standpoint - like "Privacy Policy", "Contact us" and other pages)
• Put keywords in anchor texts
• If link anchor is an image then put anchor text in image's "alt" attribute
• Avoid keyword stuffing in anchor texts
• Avoid using un-related phrases like "click here" or "more..." in anchor texts
• Linking to similar external sites will help search engines to determine your site's theme
• Use the list above to check your anchor texts and nofollow attributes

SEO Suggestions on HTML Code and Page Load Time:

• 100% Valid code is great but most of the time search engine spiders can process invalid code as well.
• Using less table tags may result in faster page load
  
• Having smaller HTML will result in faster page load
• Avoid broken images on your site as it slows down page load (click on the "Load time" link to get list of broken images on site)
• Put CSS in external files. If you can combine all CSS information into one file it will make your page load faster
• Put JavaScript code in external files. If you can combine all JavaScript code information into one file it will make your page load faster
• If you are using common JS libraries (like jquery, prototype, moo tools and others) use Google Ajax Libraries API (more info here)

SEO Tips in Dealing With Images

For SEO purposes it is usefull to analyze filenames and "alt" texts of images on your site.
• Use "alt" texts to describe the image - for accessibility and SEO reasons
• Don't overuse "alt" texts, for example, don't add them to spacer images or layout of images
• Put keywords in "alt" texts if they make sense in the context
• You can also use keywords in filenames (write keywords together or seperate them with dashes)
• Avoid keyword stuffing in "alt" texts or filenames

SEO Tips in Using Meta Keywords:

• Meta keywords are keywords related to your site. They are coded in HTML and don't appear on the web page. Search engines do NOT care about meta keywords AT ALL and there's no reason to have them. But you can get new keyword ideas by looking at your competitor's keywords!
To generate a detailed report about your website or blog in terms of the things i've mentioned above, you can use, Free SEO Report . This is a very great tool for bloggers and website owners.

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You might also like:
Too Much SEO Will Kill Your Blog
Pagerank Update June 2011
How I Learned Search Engine Optimization
Post Title Before Blog Title For Better Search Engine Ranking
Writing Blog Post - 5 Most Important Approaches
Setting Goals for a Blog
Next PageRank Update and How to Increase PageRank
How to Increase Alexa Rank
PageRank 7 is Possible for a Blogspot Blog
Free Ways to Increase One-Way Backlinks
Google Pagerank Backlinks Table

This post is written by Joel Bangahon.